In brief: Teacher turnout high for weapons training

Salt Lake City – More than 200 Utah teachers are expected to pack a convention hall today for six hours of concealed-weapons training as organizers seek to arm more educators in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting.

The Utah Shooting Sports Council said it normally gathers a dozen teachers every year for instruction that’s required to legally carry a concealed weapon in public places. The state’s leading gun lobby decided to offer teachers the training at no charge to encourage turnout, and it worked.

Organizers who initially capped attendance at 200 were exceeding that number by Wednesday and scrambling to accommodate an overflow crowd.

“Schools are some of the safest places in the world, but I think teachers understand that something has changed – the sanctity of schools has changed,” Clark Aposhian, one of Utah’s leading gun instructors, said Wednesday.

Sex offender in home claims he was cleaning

Chicago – A 26-year-old woman came home on Christmas night to find a man she had never seen before folding her laundry and cleaning her apartment in Chicago’s Irving Park neighborhood, police said.

A judge set bail at $125,000 Wednesday for Paul Edge. Edge, 58, a registered sex offender, was charged with violation of sex offender registration, a felony, and a misdemeanor count of criminal trespass, authorities said.

The woman told the Chicago Tribune she had been on Christmas holiday but returned home with her fiance to her home and found Edge sitting cross-legged in her living room folding her laundry and cleaning her apartment, police said.

“It was pretty scary,” she said.

The woman called police and officers got to the scene and interviewed Edge, who told them someone let him inside and asked him to clean the home, police said.

Mom, four children killed in house fire

Oklahoma City – A fire that ripped through a home in Oklahoma City before dawn Wednesday killed a woman and her four children and left one man in critical condition with serious burns, authorities said.

Firefighters who arrived about 6:30 a.m. found the bodies of Jeanine Bonnet, 28, and her children inside the two-story, wood-frame home.

Brian Polletto, 39, who was found outside the burning house, was in critical condition at a local hospital with second- and third-degree burns to his back and arms.

Police Sgt. Gary Knight said there didn’t appear to be anything suspicious about the fire, although investigators were still trying to determine a cause.